New York, September 25, 2015--Each year, the world's leaders are invited to New York for the United Nations General Assembly, where they are given a platform to speak freely and openly. But while the leaders of many countries enjoy this privilege, their journalists back home are jailed, threatened, attacked, or even killed for reporting the news.

I've known Paul Mooney since we worked together at Time Warner's Hong Kong-based magazine Asiaweek, which closed in December 2001. After that we'd overlapped in Beijing for several stints. A lot has been written about China's refusal to give him a visa to let him go back to Beijing to work as a features writer for Reuters --- a dream job for a reporter with as many clips as he has built up over the years. He's been quoted widely about what happened, but I haven't seen his full account anywhere else. So here is an email exchange with him from today (I've dropped a reference to some foreign journalists Mooney named who are also having visa problems and most likely wouldn't want to be mentioned):